Cinema is not only a major industry in India, it is a
powerful cultural force. But until now, no one has undertaken
a major examination of the ways in which films made in Bombay
mediate the urban experience in India. In
Bombay
Cinema, Ranjani Mazumdar takes a multidisciplinary
approach to understanding Bombay cinema as the unofficial
archive of the city in India.
In this analysis of the cinematic city, Mazumdar reveals a
complex postnationalist world, convulsed by the social crisis
of the 1970s and transformed by the experience of
globalization in the 1990s. She argues that the upheaval of
postcolonial nationalism led to Bombay cinema’s articulation
of urban life in entirely new terms. Specifically, the place
of the village in the imaginary constitution of anticolonial
nationalism gave way to a greater acknowledgment, even
centrality, of urban space.
Bombay Cinema takes the
reader on an inventive journey through a cinematic city of
mass crowds, violence, fashion, architectural fantasies, and
subcultural identities. Moving through the world of gangsters
and vamps, families and drifters, and heroes and villains,
Bombay Cinema explores an urban landscape marked by
industrial decline, civic crisis, working-class
disenchantment, and diverse street life.Combining the
anecdotal with the theoretical, the philosophical with the
political, and the textual with the historical,
Bombay
Cinema leads the reader into the heart of the urban
labyrinth in India, revising and deepening our understanding
of both the city and the cinema.
"A landmark study—carefully researched, well organized and
offering refreshingly uncondescending and strikingly
insightful discussions of mainstream films—that deserves to
be read by anyone interested in India's popular cinema or its
contemporary urban life." —
Journal of Asian
Studies
"
Bombay Cinema is an exciting and important
contribution to a field that has, to date, been under
researched and under theorized. Lively, provocative and
richly suggestive, it will also serve as a surefire incentive
to watch those films all over again." —
Screen
"Here, at last, is a book length study on Cinema in India
that does not get locked into a dance of hermetic closure
between what transpires on screen and a set of stock off
screen textual and cultural references, but more importantly,
walks the streets where the films are set, looks at shop
windows, publicity material, costumes, fashion, architecture,
telecommunications and the concrete materiality that
surrounds the film object." —
Seminar
"
Bombay Cinema is lucid, provocative, stylish and
substantial. It is an illuminating scholarly study that
spares no effort to bring Bombay cinema out of the academic
closet." —
The Book Review India
"Departing from the obsession that Film Studies in India has
displayed with the idea of cinema as a national allegory, the
book convincingly argues for the need to examine the city's
hidden archive as one that cannot be subsumed within the sign
of the national." —
Biblio
"Mazumdar has a great capacity to discuss Indian cinema, with
a brilliant grasp of its political, historical, and aesthetic
developments, but equally she is well attuned to the
interests and ruptures in the academic discourse of film and
cinema studies."—
Film International
"Mazumdar's experience as a filmmaker allowed her to offer
significant readings of not just the narratives and character
development in the films, but of the cinematography,
mise-en-scene, and other technical and performance aspects of
production." —
Journal of Popular Culture
"At once about Hindi films, spatial practices, urban
modernity and globalization . . . the strength of
Bombay
Cinema lies in bringing all of them together in a
productive conversation.” —
Economic and Political
Weekly
"
Bombay Cinema is methodologically challenging in its
deployment of
moments rather than
discursive
formations of film as text. The book also refuses to
read film alone, but interprets the medium alongside the
detailed insights of people involved in making them, and with
the recent history of Bombay, within which the film industry
is located. In Mazumdar's evocative reading of the films she
engages with, the cinematic city becomes the space of
critique of the nation, the site of the
ruin of the
modern nationalist project." —
Contemporary South
Asia